Gaza: An Israeli Prison Camp

A 1949 film "Act of Violence," shown recently on TV, revolves around an attempted escape of hungry desperate inmates from a Nazi prison camp. Currently on TV, we are witnessing a mass escape from Gaza, the Israeli prison camp, whose 1.5 million inmates are also hungry and desperate. Tens of thousands of incarcerated Gazans broke out into Egypt on Wednesday, January 23, through the previously blockaded crossing at Rafah. This included one elderly woman who exclaimed, "My heart is happy now! We Gazans are not living. We're buried alive." (BBC News 1/24/08) A senior Hamas official, Mahmoud Zahar, said, "We warned the Egyptians yesterday that people are hungry and dying." (The New York Times 1/24/08) The day before, Tuesday, January 23, four hundred Gazan women had protested at the Rafah crossing but had been met with clubs, tear gas, and bullets.

Due to the Israeli blockade of food supplies, medicines and fuel, Gazans have been living in cold, dark houses. Many medicines, such as antacids, are unavailable. A Gaza Health Ministry official, Dr. Moaiya Hassanain, said, "We have the choice to either cut electricity on babies in the maternity ward or heart surgery patients or stop operating rooms." The British group Oxfam called Israel's cutoff "unlawful."(The Boston Globe 1/21/08) As reported in The New York Times, 1/25/08, "The United Nations Human Rights Council demanded Thursday [1/24] that Israel lift its blockade of Gaza and condemned its 'grave' human rights violations."

According to Israelis, their collective punishment of 1.5 million people is in revenge for rockets fired from Gaza. Over the past six years, twelve people in Israel have been killed by Gazan rockets which are fired in retaliation for the 3534 Palestinian civilians, including 804 children, who have been killed by the Israelis since 2000. In the last week alone, the Israelis killed at least 10 Palestinian civilians. (The Boston Sunday Globe 1/20/08)

On CNN World News, 1/24/08, as the imprisoned Gazans were shown breaking out en masse, CNN correspondent Aneesh Raman explained, "It's not just about supplies. It's also about families for the first time in years being reunited." The sudden appearance of one Gazan man greatly surprised his cousin in Egypt, since they had not been in touch for three years. The cousin proclaimed, "We never know if they're alive there [in Gaza]. But when I saw my cousin I can't describe how happy I was!" The Gazan told CNN, "In Israel they have hospitals for dogs. In Gaza we don't even have working hospitals for humans. All we want is to be treated as good as the animals are treated in Israel. That is how bad it is in Gaza. We have nothing there."